Violent threats in schools are becoming more frequent

A big part of the national discussion on school shootings is finding ways to stop them before they happen.

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Jimmy Hung, the King County’s chief deputy prosecutor of the juvenile division, says the most typical issues at schools these days are children threatening one another face-to-face, not necessarily with gun violence, but some type of violence. He says schools are encouraged to take the lead in those situations.

But then there are the other cases.

“Those cases where kids make some sort of threat that’s either anonymous or they make a larger threat; threatening some sort of larger attack on the school in the vane of a Columbine sort of a situation, obviously those are incredibly concerning. They exhaust a ton of resources because you shut schools down, you call SWAT teams in, and a bunch of things like that.”

Hung says instances like that are becoming much more common.

“What you find is in 2018 those sorts of threats have almost become the modern pulling of the fire alarm. When I was back in school that’s what kids would do because they know what the response is and sometimes it’s an irresponsible, immature way for a kid to maybe get out of school or to be popular or whatever to get attention.”

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He says when there is a threat the first step is always finding out whether a kid can actually carry that threat out.

“And I will say in almost every case the kid readily confesses and says, oh my God I’m so sorry, I have no intention of doing this. And, typically, the police do their due diligence. They usually go to the homes, talk to the parents.”

In many cases, the parents don’t actually have the weapons referenced in a student’s threat. Those that do often voluntarily turn weapons over to police if they are requested to, Hung says.

Hung reviews every case of a school threat in King County personally.

“Ninety-nine percent of these cases — if not more — are those sorts of situations where once you dive into the case and investigate a little more there is no real true threat to the community,” Hung says. “The youth has no access to weapons or guns. They had no true intent to even carry out the threat, but certainly, there was an intent to scare people and that in and of itself is a crime.”

He says that crime can be a misdemeanor or felony, depending on the circumstances. What happens after that depends.

Hung says they try to find a balance between the need for accountability and public safety, and the desire to keep our youth out of the criminal justice system unless absolutely necessary.

“I don’t see how we enhance public safety by aggressively prosecuting that case as aggressively as we possibly can,” Hung says. “Because what that means is you just end up with a young person who is probably isolated, depressed, dealing with a lot of issues now with a criminal record, probably getting expelled from the school kind of losing all their community connections and social connections.”

And Hung believes taking that road could lead to a greater risk of an even larger tragedy down the line.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t hold the person accountable. Hung says in juvenile cases they try to get that through diversion efforts in the courts.

“The youth typically will enter into what’s called a differed disposition. That’s some acknowledgement of guilt and then what ends up happening is we suspend sentencing and we say, OK, we are not going to sentence you right now, we’re going to give you lets say six months to engage in these services to engage in this therapy or to engage in this intervention and when you’re successful at the end of that period of time the case goes away.”

But getting that diversion — or differed disposition — depends on several factors, including whether the child has a history of making threats or other violent or criminal behavior. And if they go into the diversion and fail to get the mental health counseling or other interventions they’re told in the specified amount of time, they’ll go back in front of the judge and could end up in juvenile detention with a criminal record.

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